Wheel of war: casualties of the Syrian conflict mapped out

This article was taken from the July 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

Here's Syria's three-year-old civil war -- mapped in all its morbid chaos. "It's now more of a dirty war, with weapons killing people indiscriminately, rather than a conflict between armed combatants," says Stefan Heeke, executive director of SumAll.org, the non-profit, social-issues-focused wing of US data-analytics startup SumAll.com.

His team collaborated with Humanitarian Tracker, a non-profit that provides crowdsourced and verified data for citizen journalists, and has documented more than 100,000 killings in Syria. "We have first and last names, how and where they died, gender and age, often accompanied by photos and video," Heeke says.

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SumAll.org created a visual dashboard that lets anyone mine the data, looking for patterns. There has been a spike in civilian deaths in recent months, while overall deaths rates have remained stable. "The percentage of women being killed, which is used as a proxy for civilian deaths, has gone from one per cent in April 2011 to over 13 per cent earlier this year," Heeke says. "In recent months there were six incidents where more than a dozen females were killed outside of a battle situation -- possibly an indicator of massacres." The types of death are also telling. "The majority of female casualties have been due to artillery, gunshot and air bombardment -- consistent with indiscriminate killings," he says.

And at least 528 women were killed by sniper fire, suggesting that snipers may be indiscriminately choosing their victims.

This article was first published in the July 2014 issue of WIRED magazine